2017 was a good year for Liqui Moly, as CEO Ernst Prost explains: “Our turnover in 2017 was 532 million euros, an increase of 9 per cent on the 489 million euros achieved in 2016. Our profit before tax is 52 million euros. Also an increase of 9 per cent compared to the previous year. That’s what we need! Just to maintain our equity capital ratio of 80 per cent.

“And because not only I, but the entire team, my 835 colleagues worked hard, economised well and so produced an excellent team result, the time has now come to distribute the – expressed idiomatically – ‘rich spoils’. As they did last year, each one of my co-entrepreneurs receives a so-called victory bonus, a special payment of 11,000 euros gross. Including the employers’ share, we are distributing a sum of over 10 million euros. That brings me the greatest joy – and of course also the 50 jobs that we created last year. In the past two years it was actually a total of 100.”

Prost goes on: “It’s also the time to not only think about ourselves, but also about other people who aren’t so well off. Therefore I have decided to privately donate three million euros to the Ernst Prost Foundation and one million euros to the Ernst Prost Foundation for Africa from the revenue I received from selling Liqui Moly to Würth.”